You can say you tried.

[quote=youngbuck]EJ doesn't provide leads lists to their field? Really? Who does? It sounds like Najee wanted a list of qualified investors without having to do any prospecting himself.  Assets, willingness to work with him etc.  Dude, if they had that they wouldn't need you!  They could get by with some other shmo.  No matter what firm we work for they expect us to have prospecting skills.  If we can't get the job done they will try to find someone who can.  A firms job is not to find assets and clients, its ours.  If we can't do it than we're not profitable.[/quote]

1.) Edward Jones has arrangements with SIX companies that provide marketing lists for qualified people, whose information has been scrubbed by those marketing firms. The thing is Edward Jones does not make it commonly known to its FAs and then charges the FAs for the lists if they are ordered through these groups. That's insane, particularly for a company that claims to put so much money into training its FAs but yet won't help its FAs bring in business.

2.) Most professional sales organizations in other industries do provide lists and contacts, so I guess that means the financial services industry needs to learn more about professionalism and making their employees more efficient.

3.) You sound like someone who is more interested in being a slave for another company and doing its blind bidding. It's not that people don't want to do prospecting, but to make it MORE EFFICIENT AND EFFECTIVE. You can't expect people to go blindly knocking on doors, particularly in a day and age of restricted neighborhoods, Do Not Call lists and (in a much worse case) the potential for being attacked. You're now delving into potential legal problems now.

Seriously, if you're going to do all the heavy lifting for a company and getting marginal reward for doing the company's work it sounds senseless to me. You would be better off doing your own thing rather than a company's bidding while it's taking the bulk of the money.

[quote=LockEDJ]Simple, isn't it youngbuck? $18-20K a month doesn't cut it at Edward Jones anymore. Minimum standard moved up.

I'm guessing there's about 2000 advisors at Jones that are realistically semi-retired and not even working 30 hours. They are putting out $20K a month, keeping $80K, golfing a bunch and once a year combining their best months so they can get one div trip a year and take the wifey someplace special.

A nice gig if you can get it, but Jimbo Dub just put the cabosh on it. Which means EDJ is either going to replace 2000 vets or generate more income from existing resources.

[/quote]

Even if that is true, you're not describing the typical Edward Jones financial advisor. That's the profile of someone with a book much bigger than the typical FA's, one so big that the production standards are met when the FA opens the door on the first day of the month. The median AUM for an EJ office is somewhere around $25 million to 30 million AUM, and that is not nearly enough to coast in such a manner. 

Just call Edward Jones' raised production standards program what it is: a forced attrition program. The average revenue per FA per day is somewhere around $650 as of October, which means the typical FA is not close to making the current production standards. Now, the firm is raising its production standards 22% over the next two years.

The newer FAs will wash out at an even higher rate and you will see a good portion of the Segment 3 and Segment 4 FAs will wash out. Also, the firm is hiring fewer candidates, so that means fewer replacements for those empty offices. In my former region, there are two $20 million-plus offices open with no replacement in sight (one office has been open since late September, which means it has less than 30 days to be filled or it will be closed). I will be a bit surprised if either office is filled, and instead the assets will be split among another office or offices in the area.

Add that up, and it's very apparent that Edward Jones wants to consolidate offices and get rid more than 10 percent of its sales force. A LOT more than 10 percent. The people you're alluding to are essentially the Segment 4 FAs whose production has been hampered the past two-plus years -- so if they may be on the chopping block, what do you think the attrition rate for the lower level ones will be?

LockEDJ,   you hit the nail on the head. I was a average Seg 4, and I didnt want to be concerned if my rolling 4 fell below a number I had 4 months to put up numbers or be terminated. I am now at LPL and other than bills and business expenses I have no numbers.

Najee, when you are saying the typical EDJ office is 25 to 30 million AUM, you are including newly opened offices etc.... This doesn't give an accurate picture of the typical EDJ vet's office that has been opened 5yrs plus. I have been out 5yrs and I am at 50 million AUM. If I looked at my region and weighed out the average office size for Vets who have been out 10yrs or more, I think the average would be slightly over 100 million AUM.

Or the FAs move their exisiting books in Advisory and work a touch smarter and keep their jobs.  It's amazing what people will do to eat.

If your region’s average AUM is $100 million why is there not more million dollar producers? Most other firms advisors average 85 bps on assets. When I was at the green machine our RL had $350 million and did $1.2 mill. That’s the issue with Jones. Well one of them anyways.

Stupid question... Jones brokers sold A shares for 30 years.  Figure it out. The path is changing and the profit of the firm will explode soon.  Your silly arguments about this will be moot 10 years from now.

Najee - Jones doesn't provide lists of names to people because it's an excercise in futility.  They'd rather you do what they have figured out works really well, doorknocking and asking for referrals.  They're not against their FAs cold calling like the rest of the world, but they're not going to encourage it.   

They do have vendors that they've worked with for many years on our systems with the ability to run the cost of the list through paybills.  That's a bit different than the cost of those lists going through your P&L.  Paybills comes out of your pocket, P&L comes out of Jones' pocket first then, if you are bonus eligible, would reduce your bonus for that expense. 

It's not some super secret thing that they only give to the special guys in the club.  And you don't have to qualify for anything to get the lists.  You just have the cash to pay for it and be smart enough to know how to search for the names of the companies on Jonesnet. 

The question I have, with 70% of households in the US living paycheck to paycheck, where are new clients going to come from? There are only so many clients with enough to invest, and that number is getting smaller. Over half of current retirees depend on social security for their main source of income, and the average 55 yr old American has less than $50,000 saved for retirement. Financial advisors are growing faster than clients.

They're going to come from the places they've always come from - inheritances, good savers, bad savers who roll over their 401k, etc. 

We're in the midst of one of the largest transfers of wealth in history.  Those Greatest Generation folks are/were good strong savers.  They learned to save a little for a rainy day, which has turned into hundreds of thousands sitting in their bank and brokerage accounts.  Their kids are about to inherit that wealth. 

I've also seen a decent interest in the grandchildren of that generation to save money.  They've seen the way their parents have squandered their paychecks and are now having to work into their late 60's and 70's and they have no interest in that.  They start out small, but those accounts will eventually make it to the books of all of the FAs out there. 

I think you need to further dissect the "averages" that get thrown around.  While it may technically be true that the average 55 yr old has $50K saved, that doesn't mean that all 55 yr olds only have $50k saved.  It's an average.  My guess would be that there are a bunch of people who have around $50K saved, some with $250K saved and some with $0 saved. 

We're not interested in the last group, but we can help the other two.  We all WANT the $250K account, but most of us will take the $50K account, put it in something easy to manage and do the best we can for them.  A couple hundred $250K accounts in some sort of fee based business will make most FAs pretty successful.  Throw in a couple hundred $50K accounts and you're one of the best paid people in town. 

Those are true words.

I’m surprised that Jones hasn’t put multiple advisors in one office. The economy of scale makes a lot of sense. Gene Hines and Joe Alcott have had a two-man Jones office for decades in Ponca City, Oklahoma. Their styles work well together and they are very successful. When I was with Jones they were just starting to put more than one advisor in small towns. When I walked into the Jones office in my town to introduce myself as a new Jones advisor in town, the other investment advisor was ticked off. He thought I was invading his turf. The simple truth is a majority of high net worth investors would rather work with a team. I think you’ll eventually see Jones move to larger branches.